Hitherto she had often toyed with the idea of him as a lover, and the thought had been a pleasant one.  But it had hardly occurred to her to be in love with him in return.  In all her life up to now she had never known what it was to really love.  She had married without affection.  Her girlhood had been passed without the mildest flirtation; for she had been brought up in a quiet country village where there never seemed to be any bachelors of her own class between the ages of seventeen and fifty.  Even the curate was grey-haired and married.  She had made up for this deprivation during the voyage out to India and her season in Calcutta; but, although she had found many men ready to flirt with her, Norton’s proposal was the only serious one that she had had and she accepted him in desperation.  She had never felt any love for him.  She did not realise that he had any for her; for, although he really entertained a sincere affection of a kind for her, it was so seldom and so badly expressed that she was never aware of its existence.  Since her marriage she had had several careless flirtations during her visits to her relatives in Calcutta; but her heart was not seriously affected.

She never acknowledged to herself that any gratitude or loyalty was due from her to her husband.  On the contrary she felt that she owed him, as well as Fate, a grudge.  She was young, warmblooded, of a passionate temperament, yet she found herself wedded to a man who apparently needed a housekeeper, not a wife.  Her husband did not appear to realise that a woman is not essentially different to a man, that she has feelings, desires, passions, just as he has—­although by a polite fiction the prudish Anglo-Saxon races seem to agree to regard her as of a more spiritual, more ethereal and less earthly a nature.  Yet it is only a fiction after all.  Violet was a living woman, a creature of flesh and blood who was not content to be a chattel, a household ornament, a piece of furniture.  It was not to be wondered at that she longed to enter into woman’s kingdom, to exercise the power of her sex to sway the other and to experience the thrill of the realisation of that power.  Often in her loneliness she pined to see eyes she loved look with love into hers.  She was not a marble statue.  It was but natural that she should long for Love, a lover, the clasp of strong arms, the pressure of a man’s broad chest against her bosom, the feel of burning kisses on her lips, the glorious surrender of her whole being to some adored one to whom she was the universe, who lived but for her.

Now for the first time in her life her errant dreams took concrete shape.  At last she began to feel the companionship of a particular man necessary for her happiness.  She had never before realised the pleasure, the joy, to be derived from the presence of one of the opposite sex who was in sympathy, in perfect harmony with her nature.